Virtually Here

Walking downtown today I came across group of people passing out pamphlets for free massage sessions by, for some odd reason, some high-tech company that I couldn’t recall hearing about. Seeing its rather generic five-six letter one-word ‘trendy’ sounding name I started wondering how many information-based companies pick their name these days simply because the dot com address is available. I mean seriously, why meebo, beebo, dNeero, etc, etc if it wasn’t for that reason?

Tangent aside, let’s take a closer look at a company who’s name may - or may not - fall into the “Yup, that’s why we named it that”-category: Plurk.com

The sign-up is straight-forward and as part of the process you get a nowadays rather common option to see who else is using the service by seeing if any of your existing email contacts have subscribed.

Once your account is created you can take a short walk-through that takes you through some of the highlights of the site, then, the fun(?) starts.

A message in Plurk is called, well, a ‘plurk’. As you, and your friends, post messages they are displayed in a drag-able time-line (which is a rather novel idea for how to display these common non-immediate, public instant messages that so many social networks are based around).

Now, assume that you didn’t import any friends and the only plurks you are seeing are..well..yours. What then? That’s when the cyber interaction starts. Plurk allows you to do searches and display plurks (sigh..) from people that you may be interested in. As an example you can search for plurks by “Females in San Francisco between the ages of 21 and 28″. Not that I would know that of course.  And with one click of a button up comes a time line showing what these 21-28 year old females are talking about in San Francisco and when they did so.  You can join in the conversations by making comments on any plurk and/or hope that someone will ‘find’ your own.

Plurk also use something that they call ‘Karma points’. You earn more points by updating your profile and being active in general and the more Karma points you get - the  more…honestly I don’t know what you get in the end.

Regardless, if you for any reason find Twitter and the likes boring today go ahead and plurk something or find some existing Plurkers in your own city and ask them why they are plurking.

(Ok, I seriously need get the word plurk out of my mind now…).

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